I guess this wouldn't be a blog about affiliate marketing that's worth it's salt if I didn't mention the recent buzz going on about buzz marketing, the FTCs comments on full-disclosure, and how it all relates to affiliate marketers.

The Washington Post ran a story earlier this week. I won't rehash it except to say that an industry watchdog group asked the FTC to look at deceptive behavior related to Word of Mouth Marketing. They basically said that they've got it covered and that all Word of Mouth Marketers should disclose any financial benefit from the companies they're promoting.

This was a shot heard around the affiliate marketing blogosphere with a range of responses from ho-hum to the end of affiliate marketing and everything in between.

Personally, I don't see this as anything to worry about. There are marketers out there who cross the line as far as acceptable behavior goes. Some of them promote programs through affiliate links. That's where the connection with affiliate marketing ends. So what?

But the disclosure question is an interesting one, and as I take a look in the mirror, now knowing that the FTC actually cares enough about this to have laws in place, I wonder how it might impact me.

Most of my affiliate stuff doesn't come close to what comes across as personal recommendations, and I would guess that most affiliate marketing activity doesn't as well. But there is of course the growing activity of bloggers who are monetizing through affiliate marketing. As far as blogs are 'personal', what's in them can certainly be construed as a personal recommendation.

Here's a real life example to think about. I catch a lot of grief about my Samsung DLP posts here. Those were experiments to see what kind of traffic I could generate with consumer product content here on this vintage, well established, domain I call home. I was pleasantly surprised at the natural search traffic I was able to get. So much that I'm trying out the incubation of a consumer product site here on jangro.com, instead of on it's own domain, consumermeet.com, which would suffer horribly from new-domain-itis. I digress.

The issue to ponder is this. I've written honest, informational guides about how to replace the color wheel in a Samsung Television. Based on the dozens of comments from now-happy Samsung owners I'd say that it's very useful. The links to the replacement parts are affiliate links, though I don't say that they are. Am I promoting Partstore.com? That's where I bought my color wheel and I was happy with them. Should I distract with a disclosure because some clown marketers are planting shills all over the net?

I don't feel that it's necessary. Nor do I feel that that FTC is interested in throttling the activity in my little ol' blog.
What do you think?

(And see, these Samsung blog entries DO apply to affiliate marketing. thank goodness.)